Durango Colorado

That's the Durango train station for the Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad in the picture. The Durango & Silverton Railroad has been taking people the 46 miles to Silverton and back for over 125 years.

I have only been to my Durango namesake one time. During a Roadtrip that spent a week in Moab, hiking in Arches and Canyonlands National Parks, then houseboating on Lake Powell, careening down the Moki Dugway, overnighting in Mexican Hat, driving through Monument Valley, then on to Durango, Colorado, overnighting at the Grand Imperial Hotel in Silverton with the next night in Taos and then on to Alamogordo and White Sands National Monument on the way to Yuma and Las Vegas.

Durango is a scenic town, sitting in the Animas River valley between red sandstone bluffs. The town got its start when miners swarmed to Southwest Colorado in the 1870s. The Denver & Rio Grande Western Railroad Company bought the land to build Durango's downtown, which quickly grew with big hotels, Victorian architecture and a three story skyscraper called the Strater Hotel, built in 1887, which is still scraping the sky in present day Durango.

Durango is at the center of all sorts of outdoor fun. Mesa Verde National Park is nearby. Durango has several ski areas. So, you can pretty much have outdoor fun year round, skiing and snowboarding in the winter, rafting and kayaking, hiking, mountain biking, hunting, fishing, rock climbing and camping during the less cold, snowy times of the year.

Due to my blogs and website having Durango as part of the name, I get a lot of Durango oriented questions that I don't know the answer to. I also have a domain called DurangoTradingPost.com which gets some interesting questions due to, apparently, there being a store in Durango called the Durango Trading Post. Questions like "the watch I bought in your store quit working. What should I do?"

I hope to go back to Durango soon. My Durango baseball cap is worn out and needs to be replaced.